A stablecoin discussion at the California LP Summit stayed with me for a reason that had less to do with crypto than with how new technologies actually become infrastructure.
The exciting part of a technology is usually the user-facing promise. Faster payments. Lower cost. Programmability. Twenty-four-hour settlement. The investable part is often messier: custody, compliance, liquidity, identity, risk controls, integration, regulation and the boring work of connecting a new rail to an old system.
I think venture investors sometimes underestimate that second layer.
The product can be simple while the system is not
For an end user, a stablecoin can look straightforward: send digital dollars from one party to another. For a business or financial institution, the workflow is more complicated.
Who holds the reserves? How does the company move between bank money and tokenized money? What happens across jurisdictions? Who handles KYC and AML? How is custody managed? What is the liquidity path? How does treasury account for it? How does the company recover from an operational mistake?
Stripe’s own stablecoin guidance is revealing because much of it is about those operating layers: custody, liquidity, on-ramps, off-ramps, compliance and integration.
That is a sign of a category becoming real. The conversation moves from “Can this work?” to “Can this fit into the system people already use?”
Institutional adoption looks different from crypto adoption
Visa is a good example. By April 2026, it said its stablecoin settlement pilot had reached a $7 billion annualized run rate and expanded support across more blockchains. In June, Visa and Brale announced a proof of concept around privacy-enabled stablecoin settlement for institutional payments.
The interesting part is not just the volume. It is the architecture of adoption.
The incumbent payment network is not disappearing. It is absorbing a new settlement rail where that rail improves speed, programmability or operating flexibility.
That is very different from the old story that blockchains would simply replace financial intermediaries.
Venture has the same pattern
I see a similar mistake in AI, healthcare, cybersecurity and enterprise software.
Founders often focus on the visible capability: the model is better, the workflow is faster, the device is more accurate, the protocol is cheaper.
Enterprise buyers have a longer list. Does it integrate? Can we trust it? Can legal approve it? Can the data move safely? Can finance understand the economics? Can an operator recover when something fails? Can the company support it at scale?
The gap between those two lists is where a lot of startups die.
Infrastructure can be the moat
This is why I am increasingly interested in companies that own the difficult connective tissue around a new technology.
Not every infrastructure layer becomes a great business. Some get commoditized. Some are captured by incumbents. Some are too services-heavy to scale well.
But when a company becomes the trusted way to connect a new capability to an existing system, that can be much harder to displace than a feature that is easy to copy.
The moat may be regulatory knowledge, integrations, distribution, data, risk history, liquidity relationships, workflow ownership or the operational trust that comes from doing the job correctly thousands of times.
The investor question I took away
When I look at an emerging technology now, I try to separate three questions.
First: is the underlying capability real?
Second: is there a use case where the improvement is large enough to change behavior?
Third: what infrastructure has to exist before the customer can adopt it safely and repeatedly?
The third question is usually less exciting. It may also be where the more durable company gets built.
That was my takeaway from the stablecoin conversation. New rails matter. Trust, integration and incentives determine whether they become part of the economy.
Sources and notes
Stripe, Stablecoin adoption: How businesses are using digital dollars: https://stripe.com/resources/more/stablecoin-adoption – Updated March 13, 2026; business adoption, custody, liquidity, compliance and integration.
Visa, adding five blockchains for stablecoin settlement: https://corporate.visa.com/en/sites/visa-perspectives/newsroom/visa-expands-stablecoin-settlement-adds-five-blockchains.html – April 29, 2026; $7B annualized settlement run rate reported by Visa.
Visa and Brale institutional settlement proof of concept: https://investor.visa.com/news/news-details/2026/Visa-and-Brale-Explore-Private-Stablecoin-Settlement-for-Institutional-Payments/default.aspx – June 4, 2026; privacy-enabled institutional settlement experiment.
BIS, The impact of stablecoins on the international monetary and financial system: https://www.bis.org/publications/paper-170-impact-stablecoins-international-monetary-and-financial-system – May 5, 2026; adoption, dollar denomination and financial-system implications.
Related reading: What LPs Actually Want From Venture Capital in 2026